I absolutely love it. I’ve been up for days playing with it. But there are some bleeding edge issues. I tried to write a balanced article. I would highly recommend for people that love to get their hands dirty. Blows away any consumer GPU.
I have H100s to myself, and access to more GPUs than I know what to do with in national clusters.
The Spark is much more fun. And I’m more productive. With two of them, you can debug shallow NCCL/MPI problems before hitting a real cluster. I sincerely love Slurm, but nothing like a personal computer.
Your complaint sounds more like the way that you have to access the HPC (via slurm), not the compute itself. After having now tried slurm myself, I don't understand the love for it at all.
As for debugging, that's where you should be allowed to spin up a small testing cluster on-demand. Why can't you do that with your slurm access?
I think that personal computing is more fun than time-shared computing. :)
It's remarkable what can now be done on a whisper-quiet little box. I hope the Strix Halo's will be just as much fun, and they should be, so long as Flash Attention works.
100% - slurm is aimed at job maintenance and resource management on HPC clusters. Thus being a pain in the ass for the kind of fast adhoc iteration and testing that AI/ML requires.
But please have your LLM post writer be less verbose and repetitive. This is like the stock output from any LLM, where it describes in detail and then summarizes back and forth over multiple useless sections. Please consider a smarter prompt and post-editing…
Since the text is obviously LLM output, how much prompting and editing went into this post? Did you have to correct anything that you put into it that it then got wrong or added incorrect output to?
Definitely reeks of someone who doesn't know what makes a readable blogpost and hoped the LLM did.
I was not familiar with the hardware, so I was disappointed there wasn't a picture of the device. Tried to skim the article and it's a mess. Inconsistent formatting and emoji without a single graph to visualize benchmarks.
I read the whole thing now and it's filled with slop. I was being too nice to ask them politely what they put into it. It's garbage and they've wasted our time posting it.
I don't really care about the emojis and the marketing voice too much. I do care that it's impossible to tell what the author cared about what they didn't, or if any of it is made up or extrapolated.
I bet the input to the LLM would have been more interesting.
> Verdict: Inference speed scales proportionally with model size.
Author only tried one model size and it's faster than NVIDIA's reported speed at a larger model. Not really a "Verdict".
> Verdict: 4-bit quantization is production-viable.
That's not really something you can conclude from messing around with it and saying you like the outputs.
> GPU Inference is Fundamentally Broken
Probably not? It probably just doesn't work in llama.cpp right now? Takes a while reading this to work out they tried ollama and then later llama.cpp, which I'd guess is basically testing llama.cpp twice. Actually I don't even believe that, I'm sure author ran into errors that might be a pain to figure out, but there's no evidence it's worse than that.
But then it says this is the "root cause":
ARM64 + Blackwell + CUDA 13.0 = Bleeding Edge
↓
Limited production testing
↓
Edge cases in numerical precision (inference)
↓
Memory management issues (training)
Am I to believe GPU inference is really fundamentally broken? I'm not seeing the case made here, just claims. At this point the LLM seems to have gotten confused about whether it's talking about the memory fragmentation issue or the GPU inference issue. But it's hard to believe anything from this point on in the post.
One of my colleagues wrote a first impressions blog post last week. It's from our company's perspective, but is a solid overview of the product and intended capabilities, from the POV of an AI developer or data scientist.
< The CPU memory is the same as the GPU memory and is much larger than any other discrete GPU available in a desktop. That means much larger datasets and bigger models can be run locally than would be possible otherwise.
Isin't this the same architecture that the Mx from Apple implements from a memory perspective?
Theoretically it has slightly better memory bandwidth, (you are supposed to get) the Nvidia AI software ecosystem support out of the box, and you can use the 200G NIC to stick 2 together more efficiently.
Practically, if the goal is 100% about AI and cloud isn't an option for some reason, both options are likely "a great way to waste a couple grand trying to save a couple grand" as you'd get 7x the performance and likely still feel it's a bit slow on larger models using an RTX Pro 6000. I say this as a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 owner, though I got mine because it's the closest thing to an x86 Apple Silicon laptop one can get at the moment.
The complete Framework Desktop with everything working (including said Ryzen AI Max 395+ and 128 GB of RAM) is 2500 EUR. In Europe the DGX Spark listings are at 4000+ EUR.
It's a different animal. Ryzen wins on memory bandwidth and has 'AI' accelerator (my guess matrix multiplication). Spark has times lower bandwidth, but much better and more generic compute. Add to that CUDA ecosystem with libs and tools. I'm not saying Ryzen is bad, actually it's great Mac substitute for poor man. $2K for 128GB version on Amazon now.
The vast majority of Ryzen AI Max+ 395s (by volume at least) are sold as complete system offerings as well. About as far as you can go the other way is getting one without an SSD, as the MB+RAM+CPU are an "all or nothing" bundle anyways.
Needing a customized spin of Ubuntu to have working video drivers is an Nvidia thing. One can also choose a Windows option, if they like, and run AI from there as it's just a standard x86 PC. That might actually be the best option for those worried about pre-installed OSs for AI tinkering.
The userspace side is where AI is difficult with AMD. Almost all of the community is build around Nvidia tooling first, others second (if it all).
Fortunately, AMD upstreams its changes so no custom distro is required for Strix Halo boxes. The DGX is the platform more at risk of being left behind on Linux - just like Jetson before it, which also had a custom, now-abandoned distro.
Because the ML ecosystem is more mature on the NVidia side. Software-wise the cuda platform is more advanced. It will be hard for AMD to catch up. It is good to see competition tho.
But the article shows that the Nvidia ecosystem isn't that mature either on the DGX Spark with ARM64. I wonder if Nvidia is still ahead for such use cases, all things considered.
On the DGX Spark, yes. On ARM64, Nvidia has been shipping drivers for years now. The rest of the Linux ecosystem is going to be the problem, most distros and projects don't have anywhere near the incentive Nvidia does to treat ARM like a first-class citizen.
There are bleeding edge issues, everyone dials into transformers so that's generally pain proof.
I haven't exactly bisected the issue but I'm pretty sure convolutions are broken on sm_121 after a certain size, getting 20x memory blowup from a convolution from a 2x batch size increase _only_ on the DGX Spark.
I haven't had any problems with inference, but I also don't use the transformers library that much.
llama.cpp was working for openai-oss last time I checked and on release, not sure if something broke along the way.
I don't exactly know if memory fragmentation is something fixable on the driver side - this might just be the problem with kernel's policy and GPL, it prevents them from automatically interfering with the memory subsystem to the granularity they'd like - see zfs and their page table antics - or so my thoughts on it is.
If you've done stuff on WSL, you have similar issues and you can fix it by running a service that normally compacts and clean memory, I have it run every hour. Note that this does impact at the very least CPU performance and memory allocation speeds, but I have not have any issue with long training runs with it (24hr+, assuming that is the issue, I have never tried without it and put that service in place since getting it due to my experience on WSL).
There wasn't any instructions how the author got ollama/llama.cpp, could possibly be something nvidia shipped with the DGX Spark and is an old version?
I'm not yet using mine for ML stuff because there are still a lot of various issues like this post outlined. But I am using mine as an ARM dev system in the meantime, and as a "workstation" it's actually quite good. The Cortex-X925 cores are Zen5 class in performance and it is overall an absolute unit for its size, I'm very impressed that a standard ARM core is pushing this level of performance for a desktop-class machine. I thought about buying a new Linux desktop recently, and this is good enough I might just plug it into a monitor and use it instead.
It is also a standard UEFI+ACPI system; one Reddit user even reported that they were able to boot up Fedora 42 and install the open kernel modules no problem. The overall delta/number of specific patches for the Canonical 6.17-nvidia tree is pretty small when I looked (the current kernel is 6.11). That and the likelihood the consumer variant will support Windows hopefully bodes well for its upstream Linux compatibility, I hope.
To be fair, most of this also true of Strix Halo from what I can tell (most benchmarks put the DGX furthest ahead at prompt processing and a bit ahead at raw token output. But the software is still buggy and Blackwell is still a bumpy ride overall, so it might get better). But I think it's mostly the pricing that is holding it back. I'm curious what the consumer variant will be priced at.
Nvidia products including from the GPU/CUDA libraries world, the NICs and switches tend to feel like MVP frequently. It works in some cases, hopefully in the end but they are far from polished products without rough edges.
So, it seems like this makes the DGX a viable ARM-based workstation, for those of us who need/want such a thing, while also offering a relatively decent AI/ML environment.
Two things need to happen for me to get excited about this:
1. It stimulates other manufacturers into building their own DGX-class workstations.
2. This all eventually gets shipped in a decent laptop product.
As much as it pains me, until that happens, it still seems like Apple Sillicon is the more viable option, if not the most ethical.
I thought about how to reply to this for a minute and then realized that I'm so desensitized by American tech companies that all the nonsense NVIDIA gets up to to maintain their economic position barely registers to me anymore.
My heart goes out to all the gamers who discovered they were chopped liver during the crypto boom.
Besides that though, I don't see how Nvidia is particularly non-ethical. They cooperate with Khronos, provide high-quality Linux and BSD drivers free of charge, and don't deliberately block third parties from writing drivers to support new standards. From a relativist standpoint that's as sanctimonious as server hardware gets.
American tech leaders often have no other choice. In most states you can be sued for boycotting, divesting or sanctioning Israel for any reason. If you acquire a company with outstanding obligations to Israel, your only option is to fulfill them.
Specifically WRT Mellanox, Nvidia's behavior was more petty than callous.
I'm utterly shocked at the article saying GPU inference (PyTorch/Transformers)isn't working. Numerical instability produces bad outputs,
Not viable for real-time serving, Wait for driver/CUDA updates!
My job just got me and our entire team a DGX spark.
I'm impressed at the ease of use for ollama models I couldn't run on my laptop.
gpt-oss:120b is shockingly better than what I thought it would be from running the 20b model on my laptop.
The DGX has changed my mind about the future being small specialized models.
Totally agree. I’ve been training nanochat models all morning. Hit some speed bumps. I’ll share more later in another article. Buts it’s absolutely amazing. I fine tuned a Gemma3 model in a day yesterday.
The memory bandwidth on this thing is absolute trash, better buy a mac mini/studio with this much ram if you're throwing this much money, it'll be faster (M4 Max)
I have H100s to myself, and access to more GPUs than I know what to do with in national clusters.
The Spark is much more fun. And I’m more productive. With two of them, you can debug shallow NCCL/MPI problems before hitting a real cluster. I sincerely love Slurm, but nothing like a personal computer.
As for debugging, that's where you should be allowed to spin up a small testing cluster on-demand. Why can't you do that with your slurm access?
It's remarkable what can now be done on a whisper-quiet little box. I hope the Strix Halo's will be just as much fun, and they should be, so long as Flash Attention works.
But please have your LLM post writer be less verbose and repetitive. This is like the stock output from any LLM, where it describes in detail and then summarizes back and forth over multiple useless sections. Please consider a smarter prompt and post-editing…
I was not familiar with the hardware, so I was disappointed there wasn't a picture of the device. Tried to skim the article and it's a mess. Inconsistent formatting and emoji without a single graph to visualize benchmarks.
I don't really care about the emojis and the marketing voice too much. I do care that it's impossible to tell what the author cared about what they didn't, or if any of it is made up or extrapolated.
I bet the input to the LLM would have been more interesting.
It looks like it worked? Why's it say this?
> Verdict: Inference speed scales proportionally with model size.
Author only tried one model size and it's faster than NVIDIA's reported speed at a larger model. Not really a "Verdict".
> Verdict: 4-bit quantization is production-viable.
That's not really something you can conclude from messing around with it and saying you like the outputs.
> GPU Inference is Fundamentally Broken
Probably not? It probably just doesn't work in llama.cpp right now? Takes a while reading this to work out they tried ollama and then later llama.cpp, which I'd guess is basically testing llama.cpp twice. Actually I don't even believe that, I'm sure author ran into errors that might be a pain to figure out, but there's no evidence it's worse than that.
But then it says this is the "root cause":
Am I to believe GPU inference is really fundamentally broken? I'm not seeing the case made here, just claims. At this point the LLM seems to have gotten confused about whether it's talking about the memory fragmentation issue or the GPU inference issue. But it's hard to believe anything from this point on in the post.https://www.anaconda.com/blog/python-nvidia-dgx-spark-first-...
Isin't this the same architecture that the Mx from Apple implements from a memory perspective?
Practically, if the goal is 100% about AI and cloud isn't an option for some reason, both options are likely "a great way to waste a couple grand trying to save a couple grand" as you'd get 7x the performance and likely still feel it's a bit slow on larger models using an RTX Pro 6000. I say this as a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 owner, though I got mine because it's the closest thing to an x86 Apple Silicon laptop one can get at the moment.
The userspace side is where AI is difficult with AMD. Almost all of the community is build around Nvidia tooling first, others second (if it all).
I haven't exactly bisected the issue but I'm pretty sure convolutions are broken on sm_121 after a certain size, getting 20x memory blowup from a convolution from a 2x batch size increase _only_ on the DGX Spark.
I haven't had any problems with inference, but I also don't use the transformers library that much.
llama.cpp was working for openai-oss last time I checked and on release, not sure if something broke along the way.
I don't exactly know if memory fragmentation is something fixable on the driver side - this might just be the problem with kernel's policy and GPL, it prevents them from automatically interfering with the memory subsystem to the granularity they'd like - see zfs and their page table antics - or so my thoughts on it is.
If you've done stuff on WSL, you have similar issues and you can fix it by running a service that normally compacts and clean memory, I have it run every hour. Note that this does impact at the very least CPU performance and memory allocation speeds, but I have not have any issue with long training runs with it (24hr+, assuming that is the issue, I have never tried without it and put that service in place since getting it due to my experience on WSL).
There are official benchmarks of the Spark running multiple models just fine on llama.cpp
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/16578
It is also a standard UEFI+ACPI system; one Reddit user even reported that they were able to boot up Fedora 42 and install the open kernel modules no problem. The overall delta/number of specific patches for the Canonical 6.17-nvidia tree is pretty small when I looked (the current kernel is 6.11). That and the likelihood the consumer variant will support Windows hopefully bodes well for its upstream Linux compatibility, I hope.
To be fair, most of this also true of Strix Halo from what I can tell (most benchmarks put the DGX furthest ahead at prompt processing and a bit ahead at raw token output. But the software is still buggy and Blackwell is still a bumpy ride overall, so it might get better). But I think it's mostly the pricing that is holding it back. I'm curious what the consumer variant will be priced at.
Two things need to happen for me to get excited about this:
1. It stimulates other manufacturers into building their own DGX-class workstations.
2. This all eventually gets shipped in a decent laptop product.
As much as it pains me, until that happens, it still seems like Apple Sillicon is the more viable option, if not the most ethical.
Besides that though, I don't see how Nvidia is particularly non-ethical. They cooperate with Khronos, provide high-quality Linux and BSD drivers free of charge, and don't deliberately block third parties from writing drivers to support new standards. From a relativist standpoint that's as sanctimonious as server hardware gets.
Specifically WRT Mellanox, Nvidia's behavior was more petty than callous.
And yes... yes it is.
My job just got me and our entire team a DGX spark. I'm impressed at the ease of use for ollama models I couldn't run on my laptop. gpt-oss:120b is shockingly better than what I thought it would be from running the 20b model on my laptop.
The DGX has changed my mind about the future being small specialized models.
Are you shocked because that isn't your experience?
From the article it sounds like ollama runs cpu inference not GPU inference. Is that the case for you?
ARM64 Architecture: Not x86_64 (limited ML ecosystem maturity) No PyTorch wheels for ARM64+CUDA (must use Docker) Most ML tools optimized for x86
No evidence for any of this whatsoever. The author just asked Claude/claude code to write their article and it just plain hallucinated some rubbish.
Wow. Where do I sign up?
Given the extreme advantage they have with CUDA and the whole AI/ML ecosystem, barely matching Apple’s M-ultra speeds is a choice…
It would be cheaper to buy up a dozen 3060s and build a custom PC around them than to buy the Spark.
Apple benchmarks: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4167
(cited from https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-10-13-nvidia-dgx-spark/)